What I Got Out of the Basquiat Exhibition, Boom For Real

Anonymous asked me what I got out of the Basquiat exhibition, Boom For Real, at the Barbican. And when I started this, I had read a bit of the latest Art Monthly, and that contained a review of the exhibition.

Artworld reviews have a number of rules, and one is: the greater the reputation of the artist, the higher their auction prices, the less it’s considered au fait to ascribe political motives and meaning to their work, or to judge it against the political requirements of the bien penseurs’ bien pensants. Bringing issues of Jewish identity to reviews of Mark Rothko would be simply crass, and the reviewer that did it might never be invited back. An artist starting on their career is going to get the full treatment, in which the slightest brushstroke will ‘challenge notions of (insert identity politics straw man here)’.

Basquiat has made the auction prices. He will never be in the Great Museums, but every serious and fabulously rich collector has their Basquiat. He is one of the few artists who is a success in the market without needing the validation of being exhibited in the temples of contemporary art. People who know visual imagery like his work and buy it. I was surprised to learn that Patrick Demarchelier has one, because his glossy, well-lit, kind and gentle style is the antithesis of Basquiat’s. So he should be hors de merde politique, but Art Monthly seems to think not.

Art Monthly is wrong. Basquiat does not need politics to contextualise his work. If you want to do that, watch Downtown 82 and Julien Schnabel’s movie. If you want to understand how his work made the hit it did, you will need to know about the 1980’s New York art market, and there’s enough about that in Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art. The exhibition covered as much as a visitor needed to know, leaving them to wonder who 'Boone’ was that they should be so nastily portrayed.

There is a group of creative people who stand as a judge of their audience, rather than the audience standing in judgement of them. J S Bach, Ravel, Debussy, John Coltrane, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Leonardo da Vinci... you get the idea. You can like or dislike their work, but if you think it’s bad that just proves you don’t know squat about music, or painting, or literature, or whatever. And yes, it is possible to not like a body of work, while accepting that it is important and good work. For a long-ish time, that was my position on Basquiat. I could see he had the touch. Look at one of his paintings and it won’t “go away”, it won’t fade in your visual field. The damn thing stays there and keeps bringing your eye back to it.

Others have borrowed the style, but they don’t quite get the sublime confidence that comes out of every one of Basquiat’s jagged marks.

It’s that sense of sheer confidence that I get from his work, and it’s like having a glass of cold Coca-Cola on a hot day. Papa Hemingway said that “the first draft of anything is shit”, and that’s the curse of literary production. Basquiat found a way of making a first draft - and one I’m sure he thought about and planned before starting - that was good enough. Hip-hop is not about polish but the spontenaity of performance, after a lot of practice out of the public eye. Inspired by that, Basquiat started somewhere and added bits here and there until the painting was enough. His paintings feel as if painted in one session with no going back - much as the best early hip-hop feels it was recorded in one take. Thought about and with bits prepared, but put together once and once done, over, never to be repeated.

There’s a scene between Rene Ricard and JMB in the movie goes like this:

RR: “It’s Benny, he wants to know why you’re not at band practice.”
JMB: “Oh man I forgot”
RR: “You’re a musician, you paint in your spare time. Like Tony Bennett?”
JMB: “I didn’t know Tony Bennett painted.”
RR: “My point exactly.”

Were those Ricard’s feelings or Schnabel’s? That the music and other work was a distraction from his painting? Schnabel’s movie talks a lot about ‘painting’ and ‘painters’, but not so much about artists. It misses the point, which is that Basquiat had, for a few brief years, the touch, in whatever he did. There’s a subtle distinction between a musician who also paints - think Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell - and an artist who paints and makes music, and puts together a garden and designs plates. An artist works in many media, as Schnabel himself turned to making movies and writing a book. Basquiat was an artist who happened to major in painting, and made music and social-critcism graffiti as well.

So to the paintings on show. My main reservation about the pictures in the exhibition as that there were too many with white backgrounds. Like Yves Klein, who is better in blue, Basquiat is at his best when he uses colours as a base for the painting. His sense of colour is unique and striking, and in the end, it’s why I’d want one on the wall. Right opposite a Cranach the Elder and a Hals group portrait.